Google’s alternative to Facebook Instant Articles is now available on the mobile web

Some time around September and November, we had the announcement from Google concerning Accelerated Mobile Pages. Delving back a little in to the details,the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) happens to be an open-source project critically aimed at adding speed to the mobile web with spicy innovations as to how web pages are displayed and built. The project, which takes lead from related moves from Facebook and Apple, came with the strategic promise to turn up pages that load at a speed four times faster even making use of of 10 times lesser data as compared to traditional pages. Following a technical preview which ran into four-month, involving lots of publishers, AMP results will now start appearing in Google search results henceforth.

Google’s alternative to Facebook Instant Articles is now available on the mobile web

This way, when you get to search for a topic in the news on the mobile web, below the “Top stories” section, AMP results will appear on the results page. AMP results, which you could identify by means of a green lightning bolt icon, presents itself in a carousel. Now simply tap a story and then you get to see it loads almost instantaneously; also if you choose to see connected stories from other AMP publishers, you could simply swipe to left from right and then another article will at once load. Now, you could access this feature if you visit google.com via means of a mobile browser, but then Google plans to extend AMP search results to iOS apps and Google’s Android.

Coming soon to Android and iOS

“We believe in getting content to users as fast as possible,” says David Besbris, a vice president of engineering at Google who was responsible for supervising the AMP project. “Helping content load really fast really helps publishers.” This of course is a big contribution to Google as well. You will agree with me that the giant tech outfit’s majority profits could be traced to web advertising, which now stands to face a rising threat should there be an eventual migration of content to Facebook. For Google, AMP fills the void of dedicated sweat to maintain the web being open as well as growing yet lucrative.

According to Besbris, effort has been impressively rewarded so far: as over 5,800 developers have so far made access to the GitHub repository, where they have gone about submitting code about 1,200 times. Even here in my own tests, AMP did well to fulfill its promise: as articles happened to load very quickly, and then I must add the convenience I felt at being able to swipe over to additional takes all on the same subject.

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He's an Associate at JustNaira. He loves to write about technology, business,sport and life, mixed with some randomness of what he would like to share. He's favorite activity is pretending that he can sing.